Consider stickers with a family crest to mark the crafting vessels as unique. . .in this case a bottomless bucket of fun was filled with activities each day to help young cousins interact and keep busy. A mustache theme was adopted to keep Father’s Day on the brain and to encourage looking at old family photographs.
“Tea Clubs” or “Tea Groups” have become popular in the middle and high school settings (particularly surrounding the “Mindfulness” movement and trends). A group of students created this wonderful tea bag wrapper kaleidoscope collage. Check it out and try it! Students could even create individual ones. Consider tea bag wrapper trading days for swapping in terms of colors and patterns. This idea is upcycling at its best. Just add Scissors and Glue.
Horse outlines on upcycled card stock. Fill in with torn bits of Washi tape. Gorgeous project.
Lots of excess ribbon fragments around? Cut them into two inch pieces; pin on as a mane for a lion face on round floral circle.
Using this at a church activity? Don’t forget Daniel and the Lions’ Den and also Psalm 34:10
Dr. Thomas Moore has a great song entitled PAPER TOWEL ROLL that encourages children to play with a paper towel roll and use their imaginations. The paper towel roll becomes a many wonderful thing, and hopefully the child gains some amount of imaginative ingenuity in the mental process of singing it.
Similarly, paper towel rolls make fabulous tools for creative projects. 
Theme: Party Hats
Ages: K-2nd grade
Games: wear a party hat necklace; sing the song: Put on your party hat necklace, we’re having a party hat time; put on your party hat necklace, let’s make a party hat rhyme; (name a word, they give rhyming words); teams to put together the most mini paper party hats
Project with Scissors and Glue: decorate a flat party hat; decorate a mini party hat (upcycled plastic inserts from cone shaped objects)
Writing: Write a word to describe party hats
There is no question that our society (and any society that is stratified, and not homogeneous) will yield circles (or orbits as we might hear in millennial culture) of communication, expectations, norms, aesthetics and ideals based on resources, expectations, moral codes and the availability of time and energy. And yet, what appeals to us in the creative realm and what dawns on those who channel creative energy is mostly intuitive.
Education, particularly in the day of choice (and probably in the day of “separate but equal,” and likely even in the heyday of public school prominence), will never be able to surmount these orbiting realms of thought. The best any formal approach can do is hope to keep up, by methods of research and response to any new state of the art development.
How do we “stay ahead of creativity” then? How do we lead it? How do we create the trends and not just follow them? How do we plan for creativity and use it for our betterment?
I believe that the goal of noticing the realms, levels or echelons of creativity going on around us is largely based on resources. Just as eating habits generally have developed from what foods are readily available, so too do creative endeavors that seem rewarding because they line up with the aesthetic and philosophical energy going on around us stem from the resources at our fingertips.
So I would ask teachers (just as I ask businesses I approach for donations of reusable and upcycleable materials), what resources are right there with you that you are not using? How could those resources contribute to the creativity you instill in students and that you model in your lessons?
The mission of Scissors and Glue is to model projects for students (or crafters) with upcycled materials; that is, the emphasis is creativity through resources that might otherwise be thrown away. Consider the number of coffee sleeves tossed out EVERY DAY. Some are corrugated, some are more of a quilted texture. Regardless the texture, they are almost all useful. Save them; find an interesting punch shape and voila. . .adornments for students to use (and not sparingly). Here, a series of pears. The lesson: fruits, songs with pear references, you name it. . make it work for you.
A special thing happened this past Christmas. A mother of three boys (Miss Chrissy) made a special gift for each of her sons.
A monster hat. Clothes for a favorite bear. And a fishing set. Check it out. Share if you’ve done the same. If you haven’t, think about what you can make for your child for a special gift and lasting memory.
Talk about a quote that’s useful (albeit this post title is a spin on the original quote: “It takes a village.”) I’ve seen it used to describe the community mothers feel in helping one another with their children, and I’ve heard it used nefariously against that same community (assuming that one mother knows best. . .as that mindset posed by Dr. Rosemary Stein.
It first came into mother and childcare worker vernacular, I suppose, when Hillary Clinton used it in her book title: It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (1996). That’s the year before I started graduate school for certification in music education, and I remember reading the book and referencing it in at least one paper I wrote.
There are many speculations about the origin of the phrase.
For me, today, in this post it serves to show that children will often create a village through their creative projects. That is, by enabling creative projects with them in a group setting, we foster community in an organic way.
